more October 2017

For the second week of class, Ron was still going over basic stuff for the new students, so I needed to come up with my own idea of what to paint. With memories of our recent trip to Mammoth Lakes in mind, I chose another of my mountain photos from years ago. In the nineties, when our sons were in their teens, we took them on a couple of weekend backpacking trips into 20 Lakes Basin, near Tioga Pass. It's a very beautiful place that's only a couple of miles of hiking after riding the shuttle boat across Saddle Bag Lake. I was a bit unsure that I could do a good job of painting it, but I dove right in and finished most of it in a couple of hours. I am quite pleased with the result.

In the third week of class, we started an autumn scene inspired by a photo supplied by Ron. I thought the photo was quite interesting, at least more than some of the other fall scenes that we have done. Ron said he chose it because Greg, one of the students, wanted to see a demonstration of painting rocks by scraping with the edge of a credit card. Unfortunately, Greg didn't make it to class to see it. I wasn't interested in any of Ron's techniques like credit card rocks or painting with a sponge. I did some masking for the leaves on the rocks and a few tree trunks, but otherwise just used brush and paint. I think it came out pretty good.

October 2017

I did one more painting last June, but didn't get around to showing it on this blog until now. One afternoon, I went out for a little hike in Garin Park here in Hayward, and I followed Dry Creek for a couple of miles. There was one spot where the shadows and reflections caught my eye, and I took a photo with my iphone. It was a complicated scene for a watercolor, but why not give it a try? I added the fish, but it wasn't exactly cheating because I did see some little fish in another part of the creek. I was afraid that it was too mixed up for anyone to get what it was supposed to be. Today was the start of the fall session of my watercolor class, and I showed it to my fellow students, and a lot of them liked it, so maybe it's not so bad.

As I said, today was the start of a new season of my watercolor class, and I needed an idea of something to paint. I chose a photo I took a few weeks ago when we were spending a few days at Mammoth Lakes. When we are there, we always go out to Hot Creek for a walk because it is such a special place. This time we chose to take a trail into the canyon a bit upstream from the hot springs, and as we started down, I shot a photo of this juniper. I think it was the clouds that really caught my eye, and I think I did them pretty well. A few minutes later as we were walking along the creek, the clouds grew more threatening, and we decided that we needed to get out of there. We found a rough trail out of the canyon, and made it back to our car with dark clouds and thunder. A minute or two later, on our way back to highway 395 when it sounded like rocks hitting our windshield. The hail was so heavy that the traffic on the freeway was either pulled over or going about 10 mph. After about 10 minutes, we drove out of it, and made it back to our cabin.